While living in anti-Semitic Vienna, Freud wrote in a letter to
Ernest Jones, "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they
would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
Tragicomic attunement seeing the comic in the tragic and the tragic
in the comic is a perspective on life that, following Freud, is one
of the best ways to "to ward off possible suffering" and better
manage the stressors, anxieties, and worries of everyday life.
Moreover, tragicomic attunement and intervention has a
meaning-giving, affect-integrating, life-affirming, double
structure that is especially pertinent to sensible living in our
troubled and troubling post-modern world: "In tragedy," said
theologian Harvey Cox, "we weep and are purged. In comedy we laugh
and hope." In Monty Python's "Life of Brian," a bunch of crucified
criminals happily sing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"; in
Stephen King's book "The Tommyknockers," the central character
thinks about a joke he heard once. As a man is about to be
executed, the firing squad officer in charge offers the man about
to be shot a cigarette. He replies, "No thanks, I'm trying to
quit." It is precisely this capacity to use one s imaginative
resources to create a tragicomic "form of life," a way of thinking,
feeling, and acting in the service of aesthetic, epistemological,
and ethical deepening, of affirming Beauty, Truth and, especially,
Goodness, that mainly constitutes the art of living the "good
life."In chapters on love, work, suffering, death, and
psychoanalysis, the author shows how the "nuts and bolts" of
tragicomic attunement and intervention can be cultivated and used
to help people better manage the harshness, if not outrageousness,
of life, as well as more deeply engage its beauty and nobility.
Unlike most books on the psychology and philosophy of humor, and
following Ludwig Wittgenstein s wonderful advice "A serious and
good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of
jokes," this book is replete with jokes, humorous stories, and
amusing maxims and quotes making it a lively reading experience
that aims to help people fashion the "good life" a life of deep and
expansive love, creative and productive work, that is aesthetically
pleasing and in accordance with reason and ethics. As tragicomic
master Mel Brooks noted, "Life literally abounds in comedy if you
just look around you," and becoming more attuned to its dynamics
and applications in everyday life is the art of living the "good
life.""
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